Yo-Yo Ma & Gustavo Dudamel in New York

Yo-Yo Ma is an American cellist, born in Paris in 1955 and raised in New York. His repertoire extends across Baroque music, the standard cello concertos, chamber music and contemporary works. He is particularly associated with Bach’s six Cello Suites, which he has recorded several times, and with collaborative albums including Hush with Bobby McFerrin, Appalachia Waltz with Edgar Meyer and The Goat Rodeo Sessions. In 1962, the seven-year-old Ma performed for President John F. Kennedy at a televised cultural event in Washington, where Leonard Bernstein introduced him. After decades of recitals and concerto engagements, he founded the Silk Road Project in 1998; its musicians began workshops at Tanglewood in 2000 and later toured as the Silkroad Ensemble. The Bach Project, launched in 2018, included complete performances of the cello suites at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus in Athens and Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado. He gives solo recitals at Carnegie Hall and joins orchestras for concerto performances at Symphony Hall in Boston.

Gustavo Dudamel is a Venezuelan conductor and violinist, born in Barquisimeto in 1981 and trained through El Sistema. His work with the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic established his association with Mahler, Beethoven and Latin American orchestral music; his recordings include Beethoven’s Fifth and Seventh symphonies and the album Fiesta. His 2007 BBC Proms appearance with the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall was followed in 2009 by the opening of his music-director tenure at Walt Disney Concert Hall, where the inaugural program included the premiere of John Adams’s City Noir. He conducted the Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s Concert in 2017, then made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 2018 conducting Verdi’s Otello.